As you can see, I've not posted for a while and that's largely in part due to the fact that the other blog takes up a lot of time. Although I was fully aware of the fact that blog posts can take a lot of time to produce, I didn't think it would be the same if I was just writing 2 short paragraphs about a particular artist. It's true to say that the writing doesn't take up that much time but the research takes a long time because I often have to go through quite a few artists, before I can find a suitable one to do a blog post on and it's not unusual for this to take two hours.
In a way the work is very rewarding because it means that I'm discovering lots of good world music, which I'd never heard of before and it means that I learn about the culture of other countries. The blog is also very popular, I so far have 100 followers on Twitter, I've been put on 5 different lists on Twitter and the blog gets quite a few views per day, it's also been recommended by a world music website, so it's nice to know that it provides people with enjoyment. It also gives me something to do when I'm not working in Oxfam, so that I'm not so bored because of the lack of things to do.
Nevertheless I have my doubts as to whether I can keep it going when I get to university because although I like the task, I've not achieved my objective of making money out of it since they only pay you if someone is referred to the website by your blog. I've tried to advertise in the right way by advertising Amazon's mp3 store and trying to sell Amazon's world music of the particular artist featured in my blog but this hasn't led to anyone buying the music. This surprises me given that the blog is quite popular but I half wonder if this is because people illegally download the artist's music or people just listen to the artist's music through YouTube because they can't afford to buy it. Perhaps I'll have to wait for the blog to become more popular, before I can hope to make money out of it. But I don't think I can wait for a very long time to try and make money out of it because law degrees take up 35 hours of your week and I'm thinking of doing a language course aswell, so I'll almost certainly have a lot of things to do without having a daily blog post to do and I will of course want free time. At the moment I'm thinking of updating the blog on a weekly basis, when I get to university, because I think that would be a suitable compromise. Nevertheless, one of my friends at Oxford manages to do lots of extra curricular activities aswell as a physics degree and she managed to get a first in this year's exams. She says this is because she's incredibly organised, so it makes me think that there could be hope for my blog if I'm organised, although that's often not the case!
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